Over at the News of the World, Fraser Nelson tells it like it is:

Rumours are swirling around Westminster. Our PM is cracking under the strain, it is said, and may quit on health grounds. …

First, the rumours are true. Brown is shouting, screaming, hurling objects around the room, behaving like a maniac. In other words, business as usual. This is how he operates — and has done since he cocooned himself in the Treasury 12 years ago.

It may seem bonkers to promise free healthcare to the Nepalese when so many British kids can’t read and write. But he’ll do so this month.  It seems crazy apologising for the way gay computer pioneer Alan Turing was treated in 1954 — when Gordo was three years old.   Our PM was 49 when he sold the nation’s gold reserves for $275 an ounce. It passed $1,000 last week. Where’s our apology for that? …

It’s amazing that he dares to speak about the economy at all. Because for him to keep on spending like this IS a form of madness.  … The national debt was £340 billion when Labour came to power. Next year, £970 billion. In four years’ time, £1,370 billion. We will NEVER be able to reduce this burden on our families to pre-Brown levels. A trillion-pound debt may be with us forever. The impact of this debt on ordinary households — higher tax bills, worse schools, worse healthcare — will just be incalculable.  It’s an act of vandalism — on the prospects for future generations.

All because a PM could not bring himself to cut spending now. This is the real insanity. Throwing mobile phones around the room is the least of it…  But it will do nothing to change his place in history . . . as a man whose economic madness brought a country to its knees.

The Mail on Sunday reports that three key Labour strategists have had enough of  Brown’s rages.  His former aide and speechwriter Spencer Livermore is too ‘scarred’ to return to the election fray after the Prime Mentalist reduced him to tears during an explosive tantrum, David Hill, who succeeded Alastair Campbell as Downing Street’s spinmeister and DJ Collins, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, have all turned down pleas to come to the aid of Brown.

Brown has instead promoted former left-wing student Kirsty McNeill, his 29-year-old speechwriter, to be his adviser in charge of external affairs.  Lord Mandelson is said to be unhappy and a Downing Street insider* according to the Times despairs “Kirsty has suddenly become one of the most powerful people in Downing Street and it has ruffled a lot of feathers. She is one of the few people who still thinks Gordon is wonderful and tells him what he wants to hear. She has huge influence now.”   Clearly she is the bunker’s new Eva Braun…

*Wonder who that could be?